Malaysia carries 72% of Korean titles in their debut week
Britain manages 33%. Ranking 92 markets by how often they carry a Korean title in the same week it first charts anywhere puts eight Asian markets at the top — and the median lag, the obvious measure, cannot see any of it.
The table this is written from: /pickup
A Korean title turns up on some country’s Netflix top 10 for the first time. Call that week its debut. How long does every other market take to carry the same title?
Malaysia is in the debut week 71.9% of the time. Britain manages 32.6%.
The obvious measure cannot see this
Our first cut used the median lag, which is what you would reach for. It was almost useless: nearly every market’s median is zero or one week, because a Korean title usually enters a lot of charts in the same week. A median cannot separate 92 markets that mostly sit at zero.
What separates them is how often a market is in that first week at all. That is the column below, and it spreads from 72% to 25%.
Fastest markets, excluding Korea
| Market | In the debut week | Within four weeks | Titles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Malaysia | 71.9% | 89.2% | 249 |
| Indonesia | 71.6% | 88.3% | 264 |
| Thailand | 70.8% | 84.6% | 267 |
| Vietnam | 68.8% | 88.0% | 250 |
| Singapore | 67.3% | 87.8% | 245 |
| Taiwan | 65.9% | 88.0% | 249 |
| Philippines | 64.5% | 87.5% | 248 |
| Hong Kong | 60.9% | 83.4% | 235 |
| Slovakia | 60.3% | 82.8% | 58 |
| Czech Republic | 57.8% | 84.4% | 64 |
The first eight are the Asian bloc, and they are the same eight markets that turn up at the top of every concentration measure we run. Slovakia and the Czech Republic are next, on a quarter as many titles.
Korea itself is at 87%, on 575 titles, and we left it out of that table on purpose: for most of these titles Korea is the debut week, so ranking it would be scoring a market against a line it drew itself.
Slowest
| Market | In the debut week | Median lag | Titles |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 32.6% | 3.5 weeks | 46 |
| Egypt | 25.2% | 1 week | 107 |
| Iceland | 26.2% | 1 week | 42 |
| Lithuania | 29.3% | 1 week | 41 |
| Slovenia | 30.4% | 1 week | 46 |
| Malta | 32.1% | 1 week | 53 |
Britain is the only market in the set with a median lag above two weeks, and it is also one of the thinnest: 46 Korean titles in five years, against Malaysia’s 249.
That combination is the explanation, and it is not about British viewers being slow. In a market where few Korean titles chart at all, the ones that do get there tend to be the ones that built up over weeks — a title that arrives everywhere at once and charts in Britain immediately is exactly the case Britain rarely has.
What this number contains that we cannot remove
Netflix decides when a title is available in each market. If a series goes live in Southeast Asia on the same day as in Korea and in Britain a fortnight later, the lag we measured is the release calendar and nothing else. We cannot separate the two from these files, and we are not going to pretend the number is about audiences.
What it does establish is narrower and still worth having: the first week of a Korean title’s life on the Netflix charts happens in the same eight markets, over and over. Whatever produces that — licensing, scheduling, or people — it is stable across 250 titles and five years, and nobody else is counting it.
Every market, including the ones too thin to rank, is on the pickup page.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Netflix — 500,340 rows across 269 weeks and 93 markets, 2021-07-04 to 2026-08-23. Russia excluded — Netflix stopped publishing its list in February 2022
The data behind this
Written from the same data
If you work in this business
Everything on this page is measured from the same weekly Netflix lists, per market and per title. We publish the pages free; what we sell is the same measurement cut to one company's catalogue — including the figures behind /pickup and /by-country.
What a company sheet contains, and what it cannot tell you →